Hunger Heart by Karen Fastrup

Marina Allemano

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Visibility x 3

Hunger Heart by Danish writer Karen Fastrup is an autofiction, a candid autobiographical novel that is non-traditional in both form and content. The plot centres around the I-narrator’s mental breakdown in connection with a love relationship gone haywire. Moreover, the crisis becomes a portal that brings the reader into the dark and sometimes terrifying space where the symptoms of borderline personality disorder reign. There are external signs of mental distress – the pacing, the sleeplessness, the loss of appetite – but many symptoms and emotions, anxiety in particular, are internal and hidden. Making the invisible visible is Karen Fastrup’s great feat and making the English translation of the revealed world credible becomes the translator’s job. 

Coincidentally, the writer herself is also a translator which turned the translation process of Hunger Heart into a rare collaboration between two translators. After the first draft was done, the editing, the correcting, the searching for nuances and precise diction were executed through WORD’s Review tab with the writer-translator and I creating a metatranslation in the Review panel. Towards the end of the project, there were close to 400 comments and suggestions to decide on, including links to images or websites that would clarify architectural details of a Danish building, or show the nuclear-red colour of a teenager’s hair. The normally invisible editorial and collaborative marginalia turned into a highly visible multi-coloured metatranslation.

One of the reasons the marginalia grew in size is Karen Fastrup’s talent for describing situations, people’s appearance and bodily movements with razor-sharp precision. But it is especially the corporeal imagery – skin, membranes, body shells, teeth growing horizontally – associated with anxiety and identity issues that demands attention. Says the author: “When I try to comprehend and formulate something about my mental state, the starting point will always be my body and, in a broader sense something physical” (see Jeppe Højberg Sørensen, “Hudens psykologi”, Atlas, 15 Dec 2018, my translation).

With the author’s explanations in mind, I, the translator, learned to avoid normalizing the often odd word choices and the sometimes awkward syntax and follow the source text more closely. In this sense, the translation became more visible as a translation. Walter Benjamin in his famous essay The Task of the Translator writes “it is not the highest praise of a translation … to say that it reads as if it had originally been written in that language.” He continues with a quote from writer-philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz: “The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue” (Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn). To this I may add that in the case of Hunger Heart, the foreign text has two tongues, in that the imagery relating to the emotional turmoil has its own tongue which has been my task and privilege to engage with and make visible.

Hunger Heart was published by Book*hug Press, November 2022.

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Date

October 7, 2023